"Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say... how we enjoy ourselves... Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death."

-- Victoria Finlay

#Space Quotes #Trying Quotes #Next Quotes

“As a teenager I just wanted to fit in, just to be one of the boys. It was tough. I went to an all black school. I went so far as to have them print my negative in the yearbook. I think it was the black teeth that gave me away.”
“I would visualize the best- and worst-case scenarios. Whether I get disqualified or my goggles fill up with water or I lose my goggles or I come in last, I'm ready for anything.”
“In Washington, there's always an effort to label people.”
“Making the family a top priority will invariably bring success.”
“Without risk, faith is an impossibility.”
“What wings are to a bird, and sails to a ship, so is prayer to the soul.”
“Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.”
“Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?”

Source : Alfred Kazin (2013). “On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature”, p.62, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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